The elderly man sat next to his bed, slowly pondering the black-and-white images, sometimes squinting to see the faces in front of him.
“That’s my brother, Babe … . That’s Uncle Horace … . That’s my mother and father … . That’s my cousin, her name is Ethel Solomon … . That was a bowling alley at one time … . I guess that’s the story of me, huh?”
Inside 44 storage boxes are more than 45,000 negatives from photographic images taken by Horace and Evelyn Stewart, who meticulously documented mid-20th century life and the news in Akron’s Black community in the years before the Innerbelt tore through once-thriving neighborhoods…